I admit, I have had to stay up until early hours of the morning, to try and finish the work on a week-by-week basis so I do not fall behind, and to be honest...? I'm bloomin' tired, every single day now is hard to just keep my energy levels up. My doubts about if I was good enough for this course faded slightly , but are still haunting my mind, and I dread to think that my mindset may change back, depending on how next week goes. All I know is that I cannot keep up this lifestyle for the next 3 years, it's not healthy physically, mentally, or socially - I have no time for my old school friends anymore, I have had to turn down so many people who have made the effort to ring, message, skype etc, because I have to get work done. Thus, I hope to have a good chat with someone soon about what to do.
Moving on to the Monday lessons, visual design with Jack in the Museum drawing the dinosaur bones was really enjoyable (Horray! I didn't come out of it thinking I'm really not very good at this!). Although, other people's drawings were still miles ahead of mine, I feel better about what I'm producing. I plan to finish the thumbnails and do a final one using a very soft pencil to get the high contrast drawings that I observed other people doing. I was already using a 5/6B, but Can't get the same effect that they did.
Life drawing as usual for me though, was terrible! I just seem to be bad at capturing a great representation of the figure in front of me. For example, the last pose was a long 20mins, and we had to focus on the use of tone... I can't even get the figure right, let alone toning it correctly. As Heather put it "What you've done is have these two areas the same, and put a dark like down the middle of it". Not to mention, walking around and looking at the fantastic work of others, makes me feel I shouldn't even be in the class. So again, not the greatest lesson for me by a long shot (I'm actually embarrassed to show my work to Heather next week...).
Aha, back to 3ds max. This week Steve went through a couple of things in Photoshop, showing us how to manipulate images to make them seamless (to and extent), which was all dandy. Except, I still feels he goes way to fast for us to understand what the hell is going on, even writing it all down was hard enough! For example, he tried to explain how to make 'grunge'/'dirt' on a tiling texture, and all I understood from it was that the object is duplicated and it uses alpha channels to see through the object with the dirt on, then place the object in front of the tiling texture. However, everything he did in Photoshop to create this alpha image, was explained to us almost as if we know Photoshop inside out - don't get me wrong, he explains some shortcuts and the general gist of it, but there's no time to absorb it all. So, even thought we went through bump maps, alpha textures, specular maps etc, I have NO idea how in the world to create and use them in 3ds max properly!
Anyway, I got my reference images for my building, and started to model it, but i'm up to a point where I have to think really hard about what I can actually model and remain within the tri budget. So far it looks alright though, just have to run with it at the moment.
The lecture with Mr Powell on the history of video games 1980's-2000 was again, very interesting, he explained things I've never heard of that happened in these years. I will save a little bit to talk about in the introduction for my next part to the timeline, but things like the 'great crash' where there were so many consoles on the market, 99% of them were not good and sales dropped drastically. Also, that the market in video game consoles was revived by the release of the Nintendo in 1983.
In the seminar we talked about how the controllers have changed over time, and got a few minutes to come up with a couple of ideas for a new controller. Excluding the motion capture gloves/boots that a lot of people probably came up with, our idea was called the "Boomerang/Bu-Move.
The concept was that it was shaped like a boomerang, you hold either end of it like you would do with handle bars, and have the buttons in appropriate locations. The special thing about ours was that it can disconnect from each other (Kind of like nun-chucks) and communicate with each other wirelessly so you can hold them as if you were holding a gun, or, connect & extend them into a 'half wheel' for driving/fling games. Overall, I quite enjoyed this seminar :)Well, that's a summary of this week - Still rushing to finish all visual design work for Monday, and carrying the burden of knowing I will run into hard troubles when it comes to texturing my building! :S
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